HBO's WESTWORLD Already Has Five Seasons Planned Out

I'm very much looking forward to HBO's new series Westworld, but I have to admit that the fact that the show was unexpectedly delayed to allow more time for the showrunners and writers to improve the scripts has made me a little more wary than I would have been otherwise. Well, according to EW, the hiatus wasn't just to figure out the ins and outs of the first season, but to craft the full arc of the entire series, making sure that they have an end point in sight from the very beginning.

“It wasn’t about getting the first 10 [episodes] done, it was about mapping out what the next 5 or 6 years are going to be,” Westworld actor James Marsden says. “We wanted everything in line so that when the very last episode airs and we have our show finale, five or seven years down the line, we knew how it was going to end the first season – that’s the way [showrunner] Jonah [Nolan] and [executive producer J.J. Abrams] operate. They’re making sure all the ducks are in the row. And it’s a testament to Jonah and [co-showrunner] Lisa [Joy] and HBO that we got them right, especially the last three scripts. They could have rushed them and get spread too thin. They got them right, and when they were right, we went and shot them.”

That's very comforting to hear that they have everything straightened out now, because there have been a number of big, high-profile shows like this that have taken a critical beating because of their finales over the past few years. But Nolan has his expectations set high for this show, and he doesn't want to have season 2 just be a rehash of season 1:

“We didn’t want to have a story that repeated itself [each year]. We didn’t want the Fantasy Island version of this [where new guests arrive at the park every season]. We wanted a big story. We wanted the story of the origin of a new species and how that would play out in its complexity.”

I can't wait to see what they've come up with. Westworld premieres on HBO on October 2, 2016.